title	author	date
Hosting Code Server on EC2 and CloudFront Distribution	haimtran	08/08/2024

Supported Region

By default, the provided template supports the following regions.

Region	CloudFront Prefix List ID
us-west-2	pl-82a045eb
us-east-1	pl-3b927c52
ap-southeast-1	pl-31a34658

To deploy in other region, you have to update the CloudFront prefix list id map. Check docs for more details how to find the CloudFront prefix list per region.

Mappings:
  CloudFrontPrefixListIdMappings:
    us-west-2:
      PrefixListId: "pl-82a045eb"
    us-east-1:
      PrefixListId: "pl-3b927c52"
    ap-southeast-1:
      PrefixListId: "pl-31a34658"
    <YOUR_SELECTED_REGION>:
      PrefixListId: <CLOUDFRONT_PREFIX_LIST_ID_FOR_THE_SELECTED_REGION>

Deploy

To deploy the stack, you can use CLI as the below command or use the AWS CloudFormation console.

aws cloudformation create-stack \
 --stack-name code-server-stack \
 --template-body file://code-server-stack.yaml \
 --capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM

The code-server-stack.yaml stack will:

• Create an EC2 instance and install the code server using UserData.
• Expose the code server via a CloudFront distribution.

Code Server Configuration

You can change the following parameters by editing the code-server-stack.yaml.

• EC2 instance type to host the code server (default t2.medium)
• Amazon Machine Image (AMI) (default latest amazon linux 2023 in us-west-2)
• Code server release version (default 4.9.11)
• Select an existing VPCID and SubnetID (otherwise default VPC is selected)

You can change configuration of the code server by editting config.yaml at the below path.

/home/ec2-user/.config/code-server/config.yaml

Here is a sample content of config.yaml with authentication disabled.

bind-addr: 0.0.0.0:8080
auth: none
password: 8766aa4b66cf555763e9564d
cert: false

Access Code Server

Option 1. The code server has been exposed via a CloudFront distribution. You can find the https endpoint in the CloudFormation console output.

Password Retrieval: The code-server password is automatically stored in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. Retrieve it using:

aws ssm get-parameter --name "/code-server/password" --with-decryption --region <your-region>

Option 2. Use AWS System Manager (SSM) and port forwarding to forward the code server to local host as the following command. In this case, there are prerequisites:

• Setup aws-cli
• Setup AWS credentials for a profile in ~/.aws/credentials
• Replace INSTANCE_ID, PROFILE_NAME, REGION into the below command

aws ssm start-session \
--target <INSTANCE_ID> \
--document-name AWS-StartPortForwardingSessionToRemoteHost \
--parameters "{\"portNumber\":[\"8080\"],\"localPortNumber\":[\"8080\"],\"host\":[\"<CODE_SERVER_EC2_PRIVATE_IP>\"]}" \
--profile <PROFILE_NAME>\
--region <REGION>